


What Makes This Fragile World Go Round

by WhatEvenAmI



Series: Mamochka [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bed-Wetting, Boundary Negotiation, Camaraderie, Depression, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heart-to-Heart, Isolation, Loneliness, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Nightmares, Non-Sexual Age Play, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, little Steve, mama natasha
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:47:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29054628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhatEvenAmI/pseuds/WhatEvenAmI
Summary: Steve's working to build a life for himself in the new world he's been thrust into, but he can't help fearing his present will never live up to the echoes of his past that follow him.Natasha takes it upon herself to keep an eye on him, and he finds they share an unexpected commonality; his holding him back, hers keeping her afloat. As they negotiate towards a meeting in the middle, both find a renewed sense of hope for what they can become.
Series: Mamochka [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2131614
Comments: 31
Kudos: 54





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set shortly before the events of The Winter Soldier. There will likely be a couple other independent stories within this series that will occur prior to CA:TWS.

Steve’s never had to deal with delayed extraction with SHIELD, and absolutely not with half his team wounded like this. 

Natasha’s the only one whose injuries pose any immediate danger, at least, and she’s the one who finds them cover in a defunct factory building. And she’s as calm and collected as she can be while she’s holding her own slashed-up leg together with Steve’s shirt and trying hard not to leave a blood trail.

Shit.

“We’re gonna have to cut her out of her pants,” Rumlow mutters grimly. “Sorry,” he mutters as an aside to Nat, pale and bent over her own mangled thigh, trying desperately to apply pressure. He’s already cut off part of his own shirt with a Swiss Army knife, airing out a nasty burn on his ribs.

“Pretty sure that counts as inappropriate workplace behavior. But for you gentlemen, I’ll allow it.” She grits her teeth. It’s not her best wisecrack, which lets Steve know how tenuously she’s hanging on. Rumlow helps her ease herself down to the floor without bending the leg, and Steve crouches down next to them. He and Rumlow make quick work of her pants, cutting along the blood-caked seams. Steve makes sure to save them—she may have SHIELD-issue weapons in her pockets—and they get to work trying to sterilize the wound. She screws up her face while they do it, but takes the agony quietly. Even in this state she won't give away their position.

She maintains her composure pretty admirably too, given that she's sitting on the filthy warehouse floor in her just her top and underpants. It's unfortunate, but she'll have to sit like that while Steve stitches her up. He'll have to work down from her inner thigh to minimize blood loss, and she manages to meet and hold his gaze, sensing the awkwardness he feels when he moves forward to do it. “On the bright side,” she grits out as he tries to bring himself to put hands to her thigh, in the strangely intimate groove where the top of her leg meets the seam of her underpants, “I think this is the closest we’ve gotten to getting Rogers any action.”

Rumlow nearly has to stop holding onto her cut as he snorts, and Rollins and Jackson crack up. “Stop it, Romanoff, you’re gonna kill me,” Rollins holds exaggeratedly onto his damaged ribs. She’s very skilled; somehow, even though she’s holding Steve’s gaze with a challenging, almost seductive look while his hands are between her legs, there’s absolutely nothing alluring about the moment. 

“You’re hilarious,” he tells her dryly as he turns his attention to her thigh. He carefully pierces the skin above the cut in an X motion, dabbing at the blood seeping over the stitch. He does appreciate her for the way she leads the STRIKE team in giving him shit, though. It’s kind of like what Bucky had done when Steve first began leading the Howlies, and it meant there was never that first awkward, starstruck moment where they didn’t know how to talk to him. People have that moment with him a lot, these days.

“I _know,”_ she draws out the word, still holding his gaze. She bites her lip, exaggeratedly seductive. Asshole. But joking through this at least means she’s not in severe distress anymore, and it makes it a lot easier to work quickly on her leg, Rumlow keeping pressure just below where his hands are working. If an attack follows before extraction reaches them, he’ll have to carry her out of here to keep her from ripping her stitches. She’ll probably be an asshole the whole time he’s doing that, too. 

He gets her leg sutured up as quickly as possible, though it’s somewhat slow going. She’d done that thigh-choke thing on a guy who nearly got a bead on Rumlow, and he’d managed to reach up with a machete and slash her all the way down to her calf. At least when they get back, she’ll have access to SHIELD’s state-of-the-art medical labs, and they’ll probably have something to keep her from scarring up too badly.

“Seriously, though.” Her voice loses its drawn-out, teasing quality, at least a little. “We worry about you, Rogers. Really, when’s the last time you did anything fun? Don’t you dare say it’s this. This has _not_ been fun.”

“When I got my motorcycle,” he informs her, face a little hot. “Had to get the feel of the new model. I took it for a spin, taught myself how to do a stand-up wheelie jump. Broke fifteen feet airborne, nearly broke my ass too. Don’t tell me _that’s_ not fun, Romanoff.”

“Nice, nice,” she says approvingly. Rumlow, Rollins, Jackson, and Murphy all back her up with the appropriate, dramatized _ooooh_ -ing sounds, making silent applauding motions. _Great_. “You ever take a girl out on that thing, though? You should.”

He upends a bottle of rubbing alcohol all along the stitched-up line he’s made so far, and her fervent expression is broken up by a wince. He might kind of enjoy the ribbing, but he hopes to divert this line of conversation before he starts thinking too hard about how attempting to date had always gone for him, before. One might assume it would be different, now, but that would be if one didn’t know him too well.

Which is kind of the problem. But explaining it is more than he can get into. Nat’s eyes pry at his in a way that makes him want to drop his gaze, but that would give away more than he’s willing to. Getting to know people always held certain complications for him, and the seventy years he spent on ice has only added to that. “Have you considered I can’t pay any attention to girls because SHIELD keeps me running all around the globe with you guys?" He has to wipe his fingers, slick with her blood, on the discarded remains of her pants. He's gotten nearly to her knee by now. "Really, it's all your fault if I don't date."

“Sure, sure, we’ll go with that. For now. We’re gonna teach you how to have a good time at some point if that’s the case. I think that means we owe it to him, right, gentlemen?” she entreats the others. She's still unnaturally pale from pain and blood loss, so it's not like he can shove her. 

“Absolutely. Even just a cookout and a game.” That's Rumlow. Steve hasn’t really picked up football, even though a lot of the guys at work have tried to hook him in. It used to be baseball that guys would sit around and talk about, back in the day. He knows he should be able to let it go, but he hasn’t yet. “We’ll work up to girls, big guy, they’re really not all as scary as this one.” Rumlow gives him a congenial nudge and he forces himself to laugh along. He thinks about joking about his time with Peggy and how he kind of likes them scary, then stops himself. That’s another complicated road he can’t go down right now, not with these people. He likes them, he does, and he’s grown to trust them in a lot of ways, but—no, just no.

Nat declines Steve's offer of painkilling drugs, though they'd help her sleep better. She worries about numbing herself on missions and she never, ever allows herself anything that would cloud her mind. She’s pretty good at turning her brain off and sleeping around the pain, though he’s never seen her try to sleep this hurt. Everyone else accepts plain topical numbing cream for all their aches and pains, and Nat frowns from her position on the floor as he gives the last of it to Rumlow for his burn. “What about you, Steve? You’ve been bleeding, too.”

“S’fine for me,” he waves it off. “The skin’ll heal up in about a day. It won’t hurt for as long as the rest of yours. It’s triage.” And anyway, he almost appreciates the pain. Just knowing he can take a beating for his team to absorb the rest of their wounds makes him feel like he’s doing something that has an immediate purpose. She still frowns at that, but drops it and accepts a jacket from Rollins to tie around her waist where her shredded pants had been. 

“No one had better come for us before extraction gets here,” she mutters, rolling herself awkwardly into it, “I’ll personally kill anyone who makes me go anywhere in this getup.”

“You on watch again, Cap?” Jackson asks. He nods. He always offers to take watch when they end up needing it. He’s never slept in front of them, nor the Avengers, and he plans to make sure he never has to. He tells them it only makes sense, because he needs so much less sleep than the average human being, so it’s better to just let the rest of them get their rest.

Everyone else gets themselves as comfortable as possible. Steve sits by Nat to start his watch—she lost a lot of blood, before, and it’s his job to keep an eye on his team. She sighs, shifting a little on the dirty concrete floor, trying to find a position that’s comfortable for her leg. Steve’s guessing there probably really isn’t one. Her eyes gleam slightly in the dark, and they sit in silence for a while without speaking. He wonders how long she’s been keeping an eye on him. She’s a little too on-the-mark with her jokes, and he knows uncomfortably well how skilled she is at seeing the things people try to keep to themselves.

“Seriously, though,” she mutters unexpectedly, her voice slow and languid like she’s drugged, though she didn’t take anything, “You really should get out more. And work doesn’t count.”

“Do you scope out all your teammates like this?” He doesn’t bother deflecting, not with the rest of the team asleep. Bravado works a lot better on them, and he wouldn’t put it past her to call him on it.

She takes a long moment to answer. The gleam of her eyes flickers a bit as she blinks a couple of times, real slow in that narcotic fashion. Her pain’s _exhausted_ her, he realizes. It’s better for her reputation, for both of theirs, if they make out like nothing slows them down, at least within SHIELD. But they’ve both taken worse hits together with the Avengers, which means they're both aware it's an act. Her guard hasn’t slipped; she’s letting him _see_ something she doesn’t show the others. He turns that over in his head, genuinely floored at the realization, and then she answers. “Only the concerningly incurable downers. Occasionally the chronically mopey. So in other words, yes, a number of them.”

Even when she’s being genuine, she’s an asshole. It reminds Steve of Bucky, suddenly, making him miss his friend with a fierce ache that briefly overpowers his capacity to speak. That ache still catches him unawares sometimes. He always thinks he’ll be more prepared for them, and then he never is. By the time he gets his thoughts straightened out, the gleam in the dark is gone. Nat's eyes are shut, and whether she’s genuinely fallen asleep that fast or has just decided she’s done talking he can’t say for sure. But she doesn’t speak for the rest of the night.

*

This new world Steve woke up in is full of indulgences, and for the first time in his life, he could afford any of them if the whim so much as tapped him on the shoulder.

It feels almost perverse to consider anything that nice, though. Not when Bucky’s not here, not when his mother’s not here. His neighbor Arnie from Brooklyn with the limp and the painting talent (but only enough money for two tubes of paint), most of the Howlies now in the ground, and just the number of people in his and Bucky’s old dump of a building that wore clothes that were more made of patch than the original fabric, though their mothers and wives and girlfriends tried to stitch it up neatly to hide that. Steve had done that for his and Bucky’s fabrics, after his ma died; it was one of the few things he was good at, his fingers being so small before he’d had the serum.

He allows himself one really nice set of charcoal pencils and a pad of sketching paper, and that’s pretty much it. He can’t let his eyes linger too long over something really fancy—top-shelf scotch or large, shiny palettes of makeup or sets of really nice clothes—without thinking too hard about someone who’d like them and isn’t here for him to share them with.

So it’s not like he hasn’t thought about what he and Bucky used to be, exactly. They didn’t have a name for it, exactly, they just called themselves brothers and that’s probably how they would have described themselves anyway. And there are some things that catch Steve’s eye that he would have brought Bucky to see, both of them exchanging subtle looks in the store. He could have even afforded them now. A particularly soft blanket hanging up in the store, available in rows of the brightest colors or palest pastels. Plush toys made to resemble animals from all over the world.

If anyone asks him what he misses about Bucky—and surprisingly few people do, aside from a few historical interviewers—he tells them the truth. Mostly. He talks about Bucky’s bravery and his loyalty, feeling like his words could never do justice to the way Buck carried those traits. He mentions scripted details he knows they’ll want to hear, like what made him funny or how he was a hit with the ladies wherever he went. He makes sure to mention that Bucky was one of the few people who appreciated him before he became the legend of Captain America, and is frustrated at how little that actually gets included in the final cut of the interview. He shouldn’t be surprised; a lot of the historians who seek him out specialize in World War Two. Few of them seem to understand why Steve Rogers from Brooklyn, son of Sarah Rogers, a nurse who died of pneumonia, is so relevant to who Captain America really _was_. 

Why should he be, to them? Captain America was a symbol, or at least much more that than a human man. Dr. Erskine didn’t necessarily want that to be the case, but he had to have known that it might be.

He doesn’t tell the interviewers all of it. It’s when he’s buying shampoo at the drugstore and he sees a display of cheap toy cars and buses and firetrucks. Bright colors. Soft textures. These were the things Steve and Bucky would have looked at together. Never in massive, flashy rows like this, not back then, and of what was available, they couldn’t afford to indulge. But one of them would give the other a subtle nudge, and gesture with their eyes. Steve can’t be sure, now, why they went out of their way to point these things out to one another, except that they each maybe needed an acknowledgement of the other’s affinity for their shared, secret weirdness.

Because they both knew it was weird. They never mentioned it to anyone, didn’t do anything but call themselves “brothers” when they were referring to it. They even kept it from the Howling Commandos, for all the nights they spent awake and talking quietly with whoever else had watch. That was the first time in years they’d stopped...doing the strange _thing_ that they did. That was probably for the best, though. An active warzone would have been no place for a pair of small, helpless children.

Because that’s what they were like, when they were “being brothers”, and Steve can’t find words to describe how easily he slipped when he and Bucky were doing it. And he’s entirely sure that Bucky had felt the same way. He’d never even told Peggy about that, and had put off the thought of the conversation they’d eventually have to have about it, because they’d both needed to focus on the intensive war strategizing as planned. But he _would_ have told her, he knows that, because he owed a _lot_ to Bucky and he never intended to let himself lose what they had.

And then he lost Bucky anyway, and the discussion that seemed inevitable fell entirely away.

And then the Valkyrie happened, and he woke up to a Peggy who thought he was still in the ice half of the time, and he lost everything he’d had anyway.

Bucky must have become pretty blind to all Steve’s oddities, his sundry malfunctionings, even though they both did know that pretending to be little kids—because that’s what it was, pretending, even though Steve hadn’t liked to think of it that way because he really had felt like his mind could fall all the way back into simpler times when he didn’t know how wrong everything really all was, when they were being brothers—pretending to be little kids was pretty fucking bizarre. But he never tried to stop setting Steve up on dates and Steve found it endearing and frustrating in equal measure. He never understood what it was about Bucky that made him love Steve so hard that he really believed that girls would start to want him the _more_ they got to know him, and he was never entirely sure if it did his heart good or if it drove him up one wall and down the other.

It couldn’t have been true, of course. He hadn’t bothered to kid himself about that even if Bucky could. Men and women alike had given him looks of disgust or pity all his life. He'd been aware of those looks from the time he was five or so, falling down from wheezing spells when he tried to keep up with the other kids. He was too small and too sick, and he couldn’t carry a woman over a threshold or work long days laboring to provide for her and the little ones, if they ever had any. If he’d been born rich he’d probably have gone off to college, and he'd have made it okay. He'd have gotten to take art classes on the side, and gotten himself some fancypants job that didn’t require lifting, hauling, running, or anything else that made healthy men strong and deft like Bucky was. He wasn't born rich, though, and he kept losing whatever job he'd landed when some illness or another flared up. And then, if you got to know him well enough to live with him, then you knew he had asthma attacks and that he had to eat pounds and pounds of beef liver every morning to combat chronically poor iron levels and that his frail body had never, not from the time he was a young child right up until he had finally, finally got the serum, stopped wetting his bed at night.

And Bucky—Bucky _knew_ all of that and still, through some kind of beautiful blindness, loved Steve hard enough to believe that someone who just got to know him a little better could love him through all of it too. Just like Bucky himself had ever since he found out about the bedwetting after a freak blizzard had stranded him overnight at Steve’s house when they were eight. That's when Steve's mom had had to explain to Bucky that with all the things making Steve sick, he might never get all better. Steve had wanted to cry all that night but had refused to, and Bucky had sworn on his mother’s life he wouldn’t tell a soul. He never had, either, not even when he was his most furious with Steve.

It’s a wet bed that woke Steve this morning, just a little before six, which is practically sleeping in for him at this point. It’s the Valkyrie he dreams of when this happens, usually. There are others in the rotation waiting for him, but it’s usually the Valkyrie. Waiting, pinned and broken and terrified, his body becoming more submerged in creeping wetness so impossibly frigid his lungs seize every time, flashing back to his worst asthma attacks, the ones he’d thought might really, really do him in. And then he’ll wake up, sweating and disoriented, the crashing of the Valkyrie left years in the past, but the cold, seeping wet has made his way here. It was plane-crash memories and wetness for him once again, this morning.

He’d hauled himself out of bed just like he always does and peeled off his piss-soaked pants and underpants in the near-darkness. It’s better when he doesn’t have to see it; the feel, the smell of urine are shame enough. He’s accustomed to stripping the bed, shoving everything into the wash and hitting the spin cycle. He wiped down the thick, industrial rubber mattress cover with practiced movements. If anyone asks, he’ll say he has it because bed was too soft before, and he'll give them a line about being used to sleeping on cots or on the ground. No one will ask, though. No one comes over to his place, really.

He’s cleaned himself off and dug out some clean shorts and a t-shirt, and it would usually be at this point that he’d start his daily workout, trying to bleed off the nerves or the grief or just the thoughts that stir around in his head, asking him questions he might never answer. The pounding of his sneakers on pavement as the sky softens into a brilliant sunrise, the rhythmic pickup of his heartbeat to match, the exhilaration of adrenaline as the sun finally breaks the horizon—if he’s ever happy, in this strange foreign world, that’s when.

He hasn’t gone out this morning, though he had dressed for it. Instead, he’s been staring into the spin cycle, letting that set the rhythm in his head instead. Watching his sheets go round and round in the lightening daylight, churning with soapsuds. Mesmerized and thinking, about what Natasha had said, when she was messing around with him in that abandoned factory.

He appreciates that she does what she does, even if he isn’t sure he likes how it means that she sees what STRIKE and the other Avengers never have. Never mind that half the time he’s annoyed at what they don’t see, and what they don’t ask.

The spin cycle begins to speed up, sheets a damp circle plastered against the inside of the washer drum. Thin water streaks sunburst out on the inside of the door. He doesn’t know what he wants, he guesses.

There are laundry machines in the basement of the building. When he’d first learned about commercially available washing machines, though, he’d went out and bought a set immediately, and had waited until the dead of night to singlehandedly haul the washer and dryer up the stairs to his apartment. He'd spent the whole night learning how to install them from the Internet, and had been immediately grateful for the discretion they provided on the very next night. He supposes that does count as a twenty-first-century indulgence, but he can excuse it if it staves off any potential uncomfortable questions he might get hauling his laundry up and down the stairs. Anyway, it means he never gets blood in the communal washers downstairs.

Getting him a _date_. Damn, damn, damn. Is it that obvious he’s this lonely? He’d thought, somehow, that having another team would be enough, or that having the purpose he always wanted would be, but even then he guesses he knew he was kidding himself. What he'd wanted was people and purposes he’d left behind in one way or another, and he couldn’t have them, and he couldn’t imagine anyone like them out there in the world. Or rather, he couldn’t imagine going through the exhausting process of finding them. 

He supposes he could settle for some friends, as a first step. He _could_ do that. None of them are Bucky, they're not Peg, but he knows that each of them came into the Avengers on not-insignificant personal merit. He does believe in them, he really does. Barton’s in DC sometimes, when SHIELD business calls him to be. Natasha trains with him frequently, and he supposes could ask her to get coffee or something.

Somehow he’s not sure _that’s_ what he wants, either.

He sighs, long and deep. The future offers him so many possibilities. It seems ungrateful to admit he’s dissatisfied by all of them.

He should at least try harder to joke back with Nat, he decides, if she tries to mess with him getting a date again. If he can joke a bit more, it might stave off the looks she keeps giving him. Friends, he can at least somewhat imagine. Finding a _woman…_

Finding a woman who can handle the real Steve Rogers after growing up on all the overhyped Cap propaganda. He shakes his head. The washer spins faster, giving off a low, mechanical whine.

He and Bucky hadn’t talked about what the future would hold if either of them did find someone, what they would do about the games they played. Steve had felt a little desperate about it, sometimes. Bucky would find someone eventually, he didn’t kid himself about that. But sometimes he’d wanted to ask, when Bucky had determinedly set him up on another doomed double date, what he was envisioning if it _did_ work out. If he envisioned them meeting up to do what they’d always done, maybe even keeping it from their respective wives and future kids—or if they’d inevitably have to leave this childish game of theirs behind in the same way they’d left their real childhoods?

He’s startled out of his reverie as the washer slowly comes to a halt. A minute later, it begins to chime. He’s been sitting here in half a daze watching his laundry machine complete a full spin cycle. He’d better get his head together. Maybe if he gets his workout in before bed, he’ll at least sleep a little better.

He moves the wet bundle of sheets from the washer to the dryer and hits “start”. Grabs himself a couple of protein bars and a banana, tries to clear the weird funk of this morning out of his head.

Time to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Those of you who came looking for cute fluff & sweetness—I promise we will get there! It'll just take a few chapters, if you can bear with me!


	2. Chapter 2

On his way into work, Steve makes a quick McDonald's run. He's not sure how he feels about the stuff they call food here, but Natasha loves it. A "guilty pleasure", she'd called it once, with that signature half-smile of hers, "It's so greasy and horrible, it's amazing. I almost never get to eat it, though." She has to stay in top physical condition for work; everyone who does fieldwork for SHIELD is very careful about their diet. Rumlow always makes a show of glaring at him whenever he gets the largest order at a fast-food joint, and Steve goes along with it just because he'd probably depress everyone if he pointed out that he has to carry protein bars everywhere to keep from passing out.

He sends a _breakfast incoming_ text to Nat and picks up the thickest, greasiest egg-and-biscuit sandwich they offer, as well as the most sugary coffee concoction he can find on the menu. Steve has _been_ to Italy, which means it feels a little embarrassing to call a fast-food drink a "cappuccino". He's heard Rumlow call them "crappuccinos" whenever someone in their team insists on a Starbucks run, and was more amused by the comment than he'd liked to admit. He thinks Natasha deserves some junk food today, though. She's been in SHIELD medical since they got back, and she won't be cleared to go home for a couple more days. They'd wanted to redo some of the stitching Steve had thrown together in the factory, and make sure the deep wound didn't take infection. They won't let her walk even with crutches and she won't say it, but she won't allow herself to be seen around SHIELD in a wheelchair. She's got a lot of hangups about her image, Natasha.

Well, Steve can sympathize. 

He makes sure he gets in early so he can stop and see her before Fury gets there. Since she refuses to be wheeled out of medical and into the greater Triskelion, Fury plans to bring the STRIKE meeting to her. Speaking of images, Steve wonders what it would do to Fury's for all of SHIELD to know what a soft spot he clearly has for Nat, to let her call the shots like that. Steve sure as hell couldn't demand that Fury bring a work meeting to his bedside.

"You _asshole,"_ Nat says warmly as soon as the door to her room slides open. She slips the glossy magazine she'd been reading into her work bag and awkwardly shifts on the bed so Steve can sit. "I won't be cleared to train for weeks. Do you _know_ how long it's going to take to get back in working shape? Ugh, give me that."

"You're welcome," Steve says, mockingly prim, as he holds the greasy paper bag out of her reach. She rolls her eyes.

She gets to work on the sandwich pretty quickly once he gets bored of playing keep-away. "You're actually the best, though you're not allowed to tell anyone I said that. SHIELD medical food is basically just hospital food. So, pretty gross. You'd think they could spring for decent coffee."

"You'd think." Steve doesn't drink all that much coffee. Before the serum, too much of it made his heart pound dangerously fast and he got lightheaded. Since the serum, it's done virtually nothing for him, although sometimes the aroma coaxes him into feeling a little more energized. Trick of the mind. "That leg healing up okay?"

"Pretty much." She pushes herself upright in the bed as if to prove it. "Actually," she makes a face, "Before people start getting here for the meeting, I wonder if you could help me get into that chair. I'd rather look as put-together as possible." 

He nods, a little touched that she'd trust him with that. Her makeup was done and her upper half was dressed by the time he got here, though she's stuck in the thin cotton hospital pants her SHIELD nurses must have put her in. There are a few coppery dots of dried blood down the inside of her thigh.

She notes this, frowning and rubbing slightly at her wrist. "Steve, I hate to ask, but I've got a change of clothes in my bag. Would you..."

Somehow the moment's not as awkward as when he realized he'd have to stitch her. He remembers what it was like when he was sick enough that Bucky had to do this for him. "Might as well, right? I already got you out of 'em," he quips.

She rolls her eyes at him again, though he's sure she'd have said it if he hadn't thought of it first. She digs through her bag until she finds a soft pair of black yoga pants. He averts his eyes while she awkwardly shimmies the bloodied hospital pants down her hips enough for him to pull them gingerly off. The whole line of her inner thigh is a jagged, angry red, but at least there's none of the swelling or odor that would indicate infection taking hold. He trades her for the yoga pants and she neatly tucks the bloody ones beneath her pillow as he slides them up over her feet. "Got any shoes to put on?"

"Would you?" she asks him. "They won't let me lean over _at all._ _"_

She sounds genuinely annoyed at SHIELD medical staff for trying to keep her from ripping her stitches open, and Steve remembers what an asshole patient he used to be for Bucky. He wonders if it's a universal sickbed trait.

She shimmies into the pants while he slips her feet into the sturdy boots she'd worn on the mission. It's a strangely intimate thing, putting someone's shoes on for them. Steve doesn't think he ever let Bucky do it for him, even when he had a sprained wrist. She encircles one wrist with her fingers and focuses on that rather than on him. He finds that striking, given that she hadn't been awkward at all when he'd had to cut her out of her tac pants. "It's the bitch of this whole hero business," he says, "Pretending we're not really human."

"Pretend?" She gives him one of those little half-smiles. She's at least half joking, but it hits home. He doesn't say anything else, but he holds out his arm to help her haul herself up out of bed. When he does, he knocks her handbag onto the floor, and its contents spill everywhere.

"Shit. Sorry, Nat. I can get—"

"No. No, Steve, I can get it." Her voice is sharp and insistent, and she's already working on lowering herself awkwardly to the floor. He feels pretty bad about it, but it's pretty clear she's not going to take anything else for an answer. It occurs to him, as he helps her ease herself down without bending her injured leg, that she could have classified documents in the pile that's just spilled out. He's still parsing out all the many, many levels of compartmentalization in SHIELD, and he's still not sure he's comfortable with it. Or rather, he's definitely not, but it's not the conversation to have right this minute.

Anyway, it could just be that she's exhausted her quota of vulnerability today. Steve gets it, if that's what this is. There were times he stressed Bucky more by insisting on doing something than he probably would have by just letting him do it. There's always some part of you, when you're an invalid, that takes over and insists that you just can't be any more of a burden. It refuses all logic when it does; Steve knows that Bucky hated the worrying more than he would have hated just helping Steve with everything.

Now he gets to be on the other end of that, waiting for her to bend her good leg so she can reach awkwardly over everything that spilled out. But it's not any of the papers she reaches for first, as Steve had been expecting. It's the magazine she'd been looking at when he came in. When he first saw the colors on the cover he'd assumed it was a fashion magazine; he knows she's always on the lookout for new makeup tricks.

It's definitely not a fashion magazine, though. The bright yellow cover features a picture of a plump, grinning baby draped in a soft blanket under the title _Parents._

She slips the magazine into her bag, then collects the sheaf of papers and various tubes and tins of makeup. She keeps denying all help while he awkwardly stands by and pretends he doesn't see what she clearly doesn't want to talk about. A parenting magazine. Is she...

She _wouldn't_ have gone out in the field if she was pregnant, though, would she? They're all forced to maintain an image, but surely she wouldn't go _that_ far. Maybe it's someone close to her who's having a baby? Not anyone in the Avengers, though, or Steve would have heard. He thinks Pepper has nieces and nephews, but he's never met them, and as far as he knows Natasha hasn't either. He wouldn't think so much on this, except it's such an odd thing for her to be carrying and he's pretty sure she doesn't want him to see it. She'd stuck it in her bag when he first came in the room, and she insisted on getting it back into her bag first thing when it fell out.

Then her bag _zips_ shut and she braces her hand against the edge of her bed. He kneels down and gets her under the other arm, hauling her back up onto her good leg. "I'd have gotten that for you, really," he offers lamely, acting like he wasn't paying attention to the magazine. 

She just shakes her head and, leaning heavily on him, limps over to the chair opposite her bed. She eases down into it, sighing heavily, and brushes off any concerns about her comfort or her pain. He straightens out her covers for her and brings over the coffee drink, making a point to take a long, obnoxious slurp before handing it to her. He earns a glare for that, and things seem to be righted between them, whatever it was that was...off...when the magazine fell out. But maybe it's a mask she's putting on. He likes Natasha, likes working with her, teasing with her, but in moments like these he's reminded that nothing is ever straightforward with her. In the grander scheme of things, that can be a problem.

Maybe he's not up to extending a coffee invite. Not today.

Although the crappuccino really was delicious. Who knew?

*

Sometimes he trains on his lunch break, putting SHIELD's state-of-the-art gymnasium facilities to the test. Sometimes he even winds up with a sparring partner for a while, though some of the exaggerated comments on his performance can be more grating than flattering. It's not meant to make him feel like a freak, but it can.

It's all right, though. If he doesn't want the workout, he can always go out and walk around. Just get some thoughts straightened out in his head. See the city, poke around a little bit.

Today, he's hoping for companionship, but not the kind that leaves him feeling ever more a stranger.

He finds himself making a meal run for the second time that day, though he's not sure Peggy will be up to eating with him. She has a lot trouble with it, when she's in a really bad state. She hadn't usually smoked, though he'd known her to indulge in the occasional cigarette when it was offered. He's still seen her reflexively motion like she's lighting up, though, when she was really confused. That reflex has stayed, but not the basic instinct to feed herself. It's odd, and Steve finds it fascinating in a morbid, awful sort of way. Her care staff had told him, gently—as if the gentleness made it better—that it's common for Alzheimer's patients to struggle with eating and drinking. 

He supposes if she can't eat what he brings her, he'll manage to eat it instead. He always needs a top-off in the calorie department, anyway.

She greets him warmly when she sees him. She's pretty lucid, then. Mostly. She does exclaim over the soup he brought her and how he remembered it was her favorite, and he's fairly sure they never ate anything like it together, but he doesn't mention it, just leans over and lets her pull him in for a hug. She's got a strength in her arms, for all her visible frailty, and he gladly leans into her embrace. "So," she asks, stubbornly refusing his help with the soup, "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Just wanted to see you, Peg." He starts unwrapping his own sandwich, feeling himself settle in a way he hasn't in days. 

"To see me?" She squints at him. "I suppose you just can't hear enough about Charles's conquests?"

"Suppose I could learn something from the fella," he returns easily, "Seeing how few conquests I ever had." Charles is a handsy resident who lives down the hall, and according to Peg, the younger and prettier of the women on the staff roster have come close to outright refusing to work with him. They at least try to fob his care off on the gruffer and more seasoned of the staff members, whenever possible. Whenever Peggy's in a lucid state, she always has a bit of Charles gossip.

"From a foul old lecher like that? You could learn an unfortunate amount about catheter placement, and that's about all." Peggy grimaces. "That open robe has made him largely unsuccessful in his amorous endeavors. But aside from him, there's nothing new going on here."

He doesn't know whether to wince or laugh at that, but he rips into his sandwich and relishes that spark in her he always appreciated, even if it's turned her slightly morbid in this place. He knows she's not thrilled about her current living situation. He'd offered, when he first came out of the ice, to take her in himself and look after her, but she wouldn't hear of it. She'd said she was afraid for him, that she'd trap him in the past and keep him from building any sort of a life if he had to look after her all of the time. He remembers the times he felt scared he was holding Bucky back too; he knows there were some of Buck's other friends who certainly thought so. It had been so hard to believe him, then, when he insisted that making sure Steve was all right really was worth passing up anything that called for him to give up a friend, and Steve knew he'd meant it when he said it. He wonders if he'd have felt more sure of it if he'd known what it was like from Buck's side of the situation. This nursing home isn't as bad as some are, she'd told him, and from what he's seen her nurses are good to her, but they're nurses, and they don't have time to be her friends. Understaffing's an issue, a lot of the time. The staff soothes her when she's confused and they clean her when she needs that and then they're on to the next resident. Steve wishes he could give her more.

Her hand shakes and she spills a few drops of soup on the front of her blouse. He immediately reaches to steady her, but she frowns sharply and flicks his hand away. He recognizes himself in the stubbornness. Peggy splattering soup down her front, Natasha splayed awkwardly on the floor trying to manage the spilled contents of her bag, his own unreliable fingers before his eyes, shaking too hard to get his shoes on and still not letting Bucky kneel down and help him. He sighs, easing back into his chair, and tears off a piece of sandwich bread. The situations they all end up in, trying to pretend they're not being seen. Maybe he overreacted, with Natasha, before. She doesn't have to tell him about the magazine, or whose child it is that means so much to her. There's plenty he hasn't told her, either. It's not about what she doesn't tell him, really, it's about...

"Really, though, Steve, is everything going all right?" She's good for him, Peg, but she sees right through him. He frowns and she continues looking at him, insistent.

"I've been back for a while," he says hesitantly.

"Yes." She frowns a little bit. "I'm sorry...how long, again?" Her voice has slowed, uncertain. A pang shoots through him. Becoming aware of everything she's forgetting agitates her.

"Over a year," he tells her. "Well, about eighteen months. Still feels off, sometimes, being here. It just doesn't seem to be going away. At least not as much as I'd hoped," he admits. In spite of the all the jokes, he isn't confused by his Starkphone, and he uses Twitter sometimes under a pseudonym, just to keep aware of what people are saying about whatever's going on in the world. That doesn't go as far as he'd like in terms of finding himself a place here.

"Of course it is. I expect you'll be carrying that jump your whole life. What a strange experience, to die and wake up again, let alone in such different times," she says, frowning. "If you're waiting to feel you're over it, you'll be waiting much longer than eighteen months, Steve." She works to clear her throat, and he quickly gets the glass of water that always sits on her nightstand. In this, she does let him help her, bringing the glass carefully to her lips. She holds onto his wrists as if to steady him, though her hands are far less steady than his own. She squeezes both his arms, though, and as wrinkled and small as her hands feel, there's a strong warmth in them.

He doesn't understand how she can be so astute one second and so entirely lost the next, but he sees it happen in the expression she wears. Her eyes lose their sharp look and her face takes on a vague sort of frustration. She keeps drinking at a kind of slowed pace, as though she's not sure why she's doing it but she might as well if the glass is there. Steve slowly takes it away so she won't choke and she frowns slightly. "You want more water, Peg?"

"I...I'm sorry, who are you?" She asks him. "Oh, is that Jonathan?"

He doesn't know who Jonathan is, or was, or how far out of it she is. "Peg," he says softly, "I'm Steve."

She looks very blank for a long moment, and then the dawning look comes over her face. He's still never ready for it, even though it's the same face she makes every time this happens. She collapses into an overwhelmed kind of joy and the tears in her eyes make his own sting. "Steve?" she says slowly, disbelieving, "You're alive!"

For her it's truly fresh, in this moment. For her, it hasn't happened again and again over a period of months. So he makes sure to hold her hands just as tightly as he did the first time, nodding and telling her, "I am, Peg. I'm here. I'm here with you." And her hands tighten in his before she reaches up to caress his face. Even though it's hard to see her like this, it's still a broken sort of gift to watch that bloom of overwhelmed wonder come over her. She knew him, knew so much more about the problems with him, knew him sick and small, knew him when he fell off the ropes course in Basic because his arms weren't strong enough to keep holding on. She knew he couldn't stay overnight in her bed after they were together, and he'd had to tell her why. He hadn't wanted to do it, and even with it being her— _especially_ with it being her—he'd had to hold his breath to say it. He'd never thought he'd have a woman in his life long enough to have to tell her about it, and to have the one he'd finally been able to trust react with disgust or shock...but he hadn't been about to sleep with her and walk away and leave her wondering why. So he'd told her, finally, that some of the shit he'd been seeing, hearing, living had made his body remember being sick and helpless, somehow. It was worse for having stopped after he got the serum and giving him hope. He knew he wasn't the only soldier who'd pissed the bed from some sort of shock reaction or another, but somehow it having been a longtime shame that hovered over him and briefly retreated made its return just unbearable.

She'd still slept with him that same night. And again, and again, and though he could never bring himself to fall asleep in her bed, he'd thought that one day he _could_. She'd made it clear there'd be room for him there. She's the closest person who comes to knowing him, closest living one, anyway, and in her befuddled state it's the same Steve she knew then and she loves him just as fiercely as she ever did. When she cups his cheek in her hand he holds her gaze so she knows he's every bit as grateful to have her here as he's ever been before.

She manages to pull slowly out of it by the time he has to leave, which means he gets to have a bit more of a conversation with her, and she gives him a gentle repeat scolding for being so hard on himself. He hasn't thought about dating, even though he knows she'd tell him to go out and find someone. Trusting someone from this out-of-place realm know him like she had...

She'd at least tell him to make friends. And to try harder to connect with Natasha. If she's noticed he's struggling, at least her joking shows she gives a damn.

And he manages to get a good amount of food into Peggy, too. She finally gives in and rests her hands on the bedspread, and lets him feed her some soup.

It means something. It's not just about the soup. He's met nurses who act like he's being so charitable to spend time with Peg on the days she can't remember much of anything, but he's always genuinely sorry when he has to get up and leave her room.

*

Fury wants to discuss a follow-up mission, and in the late afternoon Natasha carefully limps into his office on crutches. Steve guesses those are better for that image of hers than a bed or a wheelchair. Her leg is carefully splinted to keep it from bending. 

With Fury and STRIKE and several weapon systems analysts present, he knows she won't let him help her into her seat, but when the others take up all the comfortable armchairs, leaving only the hard, cushionless ones at the conference table, he makes a show of standing for her as she gets out of the elevator. He plays it off as a gosh-aren't-I-old-fashioned kind of gesture, an image he absolutely intends to milk if it insists on following him around the way it does, but the armchair allows her to brace a hand on either arm and lower herself in a somewhat graceful manner. He carefully doesn't watch her as she painstakingly balances her crutches against the chair and maneuvers herself down. She quickly shoots him a grateful look, and he's glad. He wants her to know they're still good, even if she doesn't actually know there was a moment when they weren't. She might have clocked it, though. Sometimes he forgets just how much she picks up on, there being so much she doesn't say.

That's it, that's the problem he couldn't quite pinpoint, before, over lunch. He likes to know where he stands. But he also knows her circumstances are unusual. And he knows she's had a tough, tough life and still come out the other side as someone who gives a damn. Who knows about images and why he protects and resents his own. Who subtly asks who the real Steve Rogers is and tries to nudge that guy into getting a date. 

"What I still want to find out," Fury jabs at one of his holographic screens, "Is how our arrival was anticipated. They were ready for SHIELD to there. Y'all were on my case for being overprepared, this is why we over-prepare. Now I want to know what preparations we need to make next."

Natasha's more patient than Steve when she's asked to reiterate the exact details of the mission. Did they see what direction their assailants came from? How were they dressed? How many were there? Had they said anything to anyone on the STRIKE team? They've been over it, and Steve doesn't see why he still has to be here. Fury's hiring people to put SHIELD-controlled weapons and weapons stations in another remote corner of the world. Civilians in nearby villages. He's calling it a precaution, but Steve sees it more as preemptive warfare. The mission he ran was the catalyst for this decision, and he can't undo that.

He doesn't know what the others on the STRIKE team think about that. They all look bored, and why wouldn't they be? They're only reiterating details they went over during debriefing, and then again this morning. They know it's crucial to figure out why this mission went awry. Steve knows that too. He's not naive; he knows they have to tighten up their watch on a place that anticipated what had been supposed to be an under-the-radar, in-and-out job.

A shameful internal shiver of longing passes through him. He doesn't want to be here. He'd been desperate to make some kind of a difference in the world, and now that he has the strength and the platform and a resume that can move him in pretty much any direction he chooses, all he wants to do is go _home_. Not to his apartment; _home_ home, or the last place that felt like it. Whatever bed he'd lain in with Peg, that had been a makeshift home. The collaborative paintwork he'd done with Arnie after they'd had an art class together, they'd made a kind of home in that shared space opened up on the canvas. Sitting at the kitchen table with his ma when he was very small, carefully watching her sew up the seam of his pants so he could learn how. 

And Bucky, of course. Bucky and the shared tiny apartment. That's the home he wants. It's not a baby blanket on the couch for them, no ruffles or pastels, just something brown and lumpy with uneven stitches. One of Bucky's sisters had made it as practice, but it was soft enough for them to use when they needed to pretend badly enough. It smelled like old memories, too. That made it perfect. And there were scraps of old newspaper to draw on because Steve's good sketch paper was too expensive to waste on childish scribblings. A dirty toy car Bucky had found in the street, still with some of its red paint on it. Buck's old teddy bear. All their other childhood toys had been passed down to family members or to neighbors' children, but Bucky had had the bear since he was an infant and had chewed it so badly it had been deemed too gross for hand-me-down status. He'd kept it, nostalgic, in a little box full of old memories, but he brought it out for Steve. When he first came out of the ice Becca had made sure he'd gotten back a box of Bucky's old things, but the bear's not in there. He's not sure where it ended up. 

They hadn't given the bear a name, but Steve can remember the feel of its matted, well-loved fur, the ratty ears from aggressive chewing, its nose all lopsided from age. It's Bucky he's longing for. Bucky and that, and their brotherhood. He misses crawling into Bucky's lap and getting a knuckle teasingly rubbed into his head, misses lying side-by-side on their stomachs together to draw. His body was still weak then, but Bucky made it so believable they were really tiny children that it hadn't mattered then. He misses that too. He misses everything.

He's got to stop thinking about this or he'll never move on.

He answers everything asked of him, dutiful and hollow. No, no one who'd engaged them in combat had spoken to them. No, they hadn't thought to get any information out of them. They were caught by surprise, then trying to keep Rumlow from getting killed, then making sure Nat didn't bleed out in front of them. No, they hadn't been followed. The threat had been neutralized, at least in the given moment. When Fury asks them to stay ready for the call for a follow-up mission for intel, Steve nods dully. That probably won't be assigned to him, anyway. Maybe Natasha.

He walks slowly as they all leave so Nat can crutch herself along beside him, so she won't have to walk behind all the others. "You cleared to get out ahead of schedule?"

She nods. "Long as I take this splint thing home. They think I'll rip the stitches in my sleep."

"When can you get 'em out?" If the follow-up mission is called before she's cleared to work, it might end up being someone else entirely on intel, and then he'll likely never know what action will be taken following their mission report. He thinks he should at least know. 

"Depends." She frowns, careful to keep her leg straight. "A little over two weeks, they think. You did a good job in the field though, Steve, they hardly had to redo any of it. Doesn't hurt that much, either." He's not sure if that's bravado or if her pain scale's just that fucked, but he's guessing maybe both. That gash hadn't been shallow.

He thinks about asking her if she wants to grab a drink after work. No doubt she could use one, and while he can't catch a buzz, himself, the familiarity of a beer and pool cues _thwack_ ing and the amiable chatter that tends to fill up a bar might trick him into thinking he's a little drunk. Might put that mellow kind of cheer in him, the kind of easy camaraderie that only forms between the slightly inebriated. 

He also thinks about missing Bucky. About wanting his bed and time to think and how the period of mourning never really seems to leave him. His grief is heavy today. Sometimes there's something obvious that makes it weigh heavier, but sometimes it just _is_. Maybe he just needs to draw it; that eases the feeling, some of the time. 

He doesn't ask Natasha about the drink. If she _is_ concealing a pregnancy, he realizes, she wouldn't be able to drink with him anyway. They could still grab a bite, though. Something.

He sighs, thinks about his bed, about pretending his comforter is the lumpy brown blanket. About drawing till his wrist cramps and leaving it all behind in his sketchbook. He doesn't ask to get a bite either.

Maybe another time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates may be sporadic. I'm taking classes for grad school and I am a graduate teaching assistant at the university, so everything's crazy right now. Still, the cute stuff I promised IS in the works.


	3. Chapter 3

It's fragments of the old apartment he finds himself sketching that evening. The couch and a handful of rough lines etching out the thick stitches of that old knitted blanket, balled up and lumpy. An array of boxy shapes becomes newspaper pages sprawled out on the floor. Lines of print ink and then pencil-mark scribbles.

He's drawn Bucky after he came out of the ice, but he doesn't tonight. Not in these pictures. His presence still weighs heavily in each penstroke bringing the old apartment that much closer to real. He abandons the drawing of the blanket. The couch is half-finished. It makes him want to howl, the gaping emptiness where Bucky should be. The drawings only bring it back to him where he thought there would be release. Shadowy fragments of half-finished rooms in various states of detail are a kind of void in themselves. He looks into the empty spaces where the corners of his old living room could meet together and their potential to do so is a threat, both with Bucky's presence in the drawings and his absence. _Not here, not here, not here._

He has to stop this. It's making him want to let out something terrifying and destructive. He wants to make the world feel what's been lost. He wants to scream throw himself down and make a spectacle of himself in the street.

He can't bring himself to tear up the drawings. With gritted teeth, he carefully tucks them away and begins dressing to run.

His pre-run stretches and warmup workout feel right and strange at the same time. The adrenaline frees up his mind, allowing hints of elation and hope to seep through, and he works himself harder, chasing them down, breathing them in.

He doesn't really expect to look down and see pale, spindly limbs on the verge of collapse when he does his push-ups. Or to feel a small, aching chest straining to expand when his breathing picks up. Even so, there are some days it's still a surprise to pick himself up and find himself so high off the floor, with so much _body_ at his command.

That's not new, at least. He'd spent the first couple weeks after the serum banging into doorframes, forgetting how much broader his shoulders were. It had taken him a while to stop himself from yanking in sharp breaths after a demanding task, anticipating a fight from angry lungs. He'd had anxious dreams, sometimes, about finding himself in his old body, all of his strength stripped away. Sometimes he hadn't been sure it'd be a bad thing. People looked at him with respect when he gained his height and breadth, and he never knew if it was honest. One thing about being a sick, scrawny young man, he'd learned pretty quick who the truest people were. He'd always wanted to know, after his transformation, whenever he met someone new— _would you be looking at me like that if I was still a hundred pounds soaking wet?_

Because people did treat him differently, after. He'd noticed the difference a lot right after the serum, and it never sat right with him. That feeling's faded a bit, with time, but he's never forgotten.

His pounding footsteps clear his head, working in rhythm to keep his thoughts moving through his head. The peace that finally follows is like a thick, soothing fog after a storm. In the calm of that fog, he keeps running, savoring the rhythmic noise of his breath. He runs for a long, long time, savoring how easily his thoughts settle when he keeps moving. And when he finally makes his way back to his apartment and moves into his cooldown, the endorphins sweep away the fog and leave a sharp, easy clarity that surprises him every time.

Calmer now, he jumps in the shower, heat all the way up. That's one thing that's not bad at all about this century. There's always hot, running water at his place, and the warmth never seems to run out, not even when he needs it for an additional twenty minutes some mornings to chase away the ice from a dream. He enjoys scrubbing himself down in the hot spray and climbing into freshly-laundered pajamas. It's all right. He can do this. He'll figure out what questions to ask at work tomorrow, regarding the installment of SHIELD weapons. He'll do what he needs to do and he won't back down. And maybe he'll even take Rumlow and the guys up on their cookout invite. Peg's right, it's only natural that he'd be carrying a bit of a lost feeling with the massive shift in time. He doesn't have to agonize about that. It'll be okay. He can do this.

He doesn't try to take up his drawing again, though. He lets that lie for now. But at least he can think about coming back to it at some point, letting himself feel for what he lost.

For now, he just flips through the TV channels to see if anything good's on, then takes himself to bed, feeling cautiously optimistic about tomorrow.

*

He snaps awake in the dark to a rustling sound and a muffled _thump_ and he freezes in his wet bed. Then he launches himself up. Someone's in his room.

There's cold piss down his legs and an internal flush rises. It feels like it could kill him. But he has no choice; he has to defend himself. There's a shadowy shape rising by his window and he turns to face the intruder, who's—

Who's actually struggling to get to their feet. How the hell did they get in here? He's on the _third floor._

"Steve, hey." It's _Natasha's_ voice, low and quiet, and he's torn between _how_ and _why_ and an acute, burning awareness of his wet pajama pants. "I'm so sorry about this, I fucked up, I badgered medical into letting me out too early—shit, hang on." And while he's trying to think of a way to hide his situation, she's reaching over and switching his lamp on. The room is illuminated, and just like that, she can see.

All Steve can do is stare at her. For a moment, she stares back. It's a small mercy that her face doesn't change at all, but he can see the incremental movements as her eyes flick between him and the bed. Something solid and weighty settles in his chest as he steels himself. It's going to be awful, but he'll deal with it. He can't see how, but he will.

"Steve," she says. Her voice is unusually soft, and for some reason it catches him off-guard. "I'm sorry. I was attacked, I couldn't fight with my leg. Your place was closest."

He doesn't know why he hadn't anticipated that softness, but it withers up all his defenses and leaves him feeling strangely small. "How the hell did you get in through the window?" Is what ends up coming out of his mouth, and his voice sounds off and not his own.

A crease appears on her forehead. She holds his gaze, and even though he wishes he could make himself look away, there's a softness in her eyes that he hadn't expected and he finds himself desperate for it. It's been so long since anyone knew. So long since anyone cared. Finally, finally he breaks her gaze and looks at the floor. "Is my place about to be attacked?"

"I don't think so. I was—I have made a lot of enemies, in my career." Looking down isn't actually better than looking at her. He can see the piss splotches on his legs now, starting to itch. "Someone must have heard I was laid up. I think this attack was personal—my first night out of medical, with a bad leg injury. Doesn't seem like a coincidence. I think they wanted to get me by surprise."

"They? You don't know who it was?" But this is such a _weird_ conversation to be having, standing here wet next to his soiled bed like this. 

The same thing must have occurred to her. "Their face was covered. Look, we can talk after you deal with this. Just show me where your med kit is. Weapons, too."

She must have fucked up her leg getting in his window. It's surreal, walking over to her and helping her limp out of his bedroom. "You really couldn't have used the front entrance?"

"Came at your building from the back. Actually, I came up around the alley and climbed around the side of the building to your window." He eases her down on the couch and hurries to retrieve his med gear and some weapons. He feels like he should ask how she knew which window was his, but he also feels like he desperately wants to peel off these pants and get himself looking half-dignified again, and he lets that feeling win out. He trundles off down the hall to clean up. 

He gets himself in the shower for the second time that night, miserably scrubbing at himself. His mind keeps replaying the moment Natasha turned on the light and he was exposed. He wants to sink down to the shower floor and just sit there, curled up in the hot water. He wants Bucky. He wants Peggy to be of sound mind so he can ask her how the hell to move on from this. He wants, most of all, to not be in this century.

His hands are shaking while he cleans himself. They're shaking and he doesn't remember the nightmare he must have been having, doesn't know if that's what's making him shake or if it's the moment Natasha turned on the light and saw him. They're going to have to work together after this. They're going to have to go in _tomorrow._ They're going to have to talk about Natasha being attacked, which should honestly be his prime concern, and he should get his self-pitying ass out of the shower in case her attacker figures out she's here and makes a second attempt on her life. Instead, he keeps hiding, shaking and shaking, getting worse as the adrenaline from before fades and the realization that this is actually happening gradually dawns on him. He sinks down into a crouch against his will, his breathing shaky and echoing in the confines of the shower. He can't leave the warmth, even though it's not Bucky's arms or Peg's or, God help him, his mother's. 

He's not sure how long he stays crouched like that, trying to steady his breathing, his head resting on his folded arms. It must look pathetic. He _feels_ pretty pathetic. But he has to go out there and pretend that this isn't one of the few things that could really break him.

He forces himself to take one long, steadying breath after another. His legs went a little numb while he was starting to hyperventilate, but he manages to make them push him upright again, one slick palm braced against the shower wall. His head spins a bit as he gets up, but he manages to turn off the faucet and move his uncooperative body out of the tub, shivering. 

He tries to imagine it's Bucky wrapping him in the towel, clumsily drying him with all the earnest seriousness of a five-year-old. He'd always snuggled him up in the towel and pulled him in for a bear hug. Pretending he's there helps calm him, even if it makes the ache of missing him that much worse. Steve steels himself and returns from the bathroom to the bedroom. 

He winces at the sight of his tangled comforter trailing onto the floor, exposing the sheets marked with a large wet spot in the middle. At least he has a fresh pair of pajamas waiting, soft and warm and smelling like laundry soap. He grimly strips the sheets, wiping down the mattress cover, and carefully folds them around his pajamas so that all wet spots on the fabric are concealed. It's stupid; she already saw that he wet them. Something still compels him to cling to some last shred of dignity, though. If it even exists. He takes the wet sheets to the laundry machine at the end of the hall, carefully avoiding the sight of Natasha sprawled out on the couch. He can feel her eyes on him as he shoves the bundle of sheets into the washer and measures out the detergent.

As usual, the startup hum of the washer is comforting to him. Hell of a lot better than doing the sheets by hand in a cold basin like he used to. The rhythmic churning of soapsuds inside the metal drum fortifies him, somehow, and he can breathe again as the clean smell of laundry soap permeates the kitchen.

"Steve," Natasha says from the couch, low and soft. "Does this happen a lot?"

He can't answer. She must _know;_ he's jerry-rigged the wiring connecting the washer-dryer unit to the outlet, because this building wasn't designed to have individual washers in each apartment. She doesn't miss anything. If she's caught how makeshift his setup is, it's pretty obvious why he has it.

"Are you all right?" she asks, calm and insistent. She's not mocking; a cold knot loosens somewhere in his gut. He has to rely on her. She knows; he never meant for it to happen like this, but now he has to hope he can trust her. But she came to him, too. She let him help her in the hospital. When his head sinks down briefly to rest against the dryer, he doesn't try to stop it. He lets her see.

"I don't know."

She's quiet for a moment. "Come sit down with me," she says. "We have to talk, anyway. I'd make you something hot to drink, but...well."

"I can make it," he says lowly. It'll give him something to do besides look at her. This night has clearly bested him; eye contact is beyond him at this moment. He starts a kettle for tea, busying himself with a couple of mugs and rummaging through his cupboards, though he already knows what he has in there.

"I really am sorry," she says, and she sounds like it. "Rolling in on you like this. I should have fucking stayed in SHIELD medical, Steve, but I never like anyone to know I'm—well. Someone did know. So now we have a problem."

"Sounds like we would have had one even if you'd stayed," he manages to keep his voice steady. "So now we know. We have a mole."

"We might," she frowns, "They ran when they realized I was getting away. I don't think they wanted to risk me reaching backup. This was supposed to be a stealth job. I was careful, when I came here, but I think—I think even if they knew I came here, they wouldn't come back. It was meant to be quiet."

He turns to glance at her and is oddly comforted by the sight of her working on her own stitches in her underpants on his couch. The situation isn't what he'd call balanced, but he doesn't feel so off-kilter knowing he's the only one in an awkward position right now. "You seem pretty calm considering someone just made an attempt on your life."

"I'm very used to that, actually." She frowns, dabbing at her leg. "What I'm concerned about now is that the mission complication and this both indicate potentially compromised security within SHIELD. From the outside, or from within. Either way, it's not good. Though whoever it is has a personal problem with me, unless the events are unrelated. In that case..." she sighs. "Dammit."

"Does anyone else know about this? Have you told Fury?" The water is steaming now, beginning to bubble, and the churning of the washer picks up. Steve's stomach churns a little, too, so in rhythm with the sound of it. His hand stays steady as he places teabags into cups.

"Yeah. He's got a few people out looking now, but whoever's out there, they've had time to switch clothes, get far away..." she shrugs. "We'll be meeting with him tomorrow morning. I don't know where yet."

"Does he know you're with me?" Steve really hopes Fury's not going to come _here._ He doesn't think his nerves can take another set of eyes scouring his apartment right now.

"Just told him I got somewhere safe." She looks up at him, serious. He is _somewhere safe._ That's important. 

He stands there for a little while, watching her methodically re-stitch her own thigh. There's a bit of blood on her fingers—she's having a bit of trouble holding the suture needle—but nothing close to the bleed-out risk she was having when she was first cut. She did a number on the stitches by her knee, which is smeared with fresh blood from where she's been working. The rest of it is just a trickle. It's not a task for the squeamish, stitching oneself. She has to admire how unflinchingly she probes into her opened skin, slipping the needle through in a careful, practiced movement. She prods gently at her own work once the line of X's has been closed once more, using a sterile wipe to clean her leg and her hands. He won't have this as a distraction forever—her work is quick. Already she's reaching for some cotton gauze to line the worst of the ripped stitches, wrapping ACE bandage around it to hold it in place. He's going to have to face her now, face this.

"How bad was it?" he asks finally. "Your leg." Her clothes are dark, so he can't tell if she bled on them, or how much. 

"Well, it's still attached to the rest of me, and I think it'll stay that way." She gestures at her pants. "Help me out?"

The process is easy between them now, each holding a little of what the other is dealing with. Once she finishes dressing herself, she reaches over and lays her hand on his wrist, warm and startling. There's warmth in her gaze when he meets her eyes. "Help me get to the table," she says softly. "I want to talk to you. We'll have tea while we do, it'll help."

She keeps her arm tightly around him while he helps her limp over to the kitchen. He's dreading this talk. She's been seeing little glimpses of how hard he's been struggling. And it _was_ struggling, he admits. He thought he was getting by, pushing toward progress. He has been _dragging_ himself through, and she knows it. He carefully deposits her in a chair and pours them both tea. This isn't going to be easy, but she's seen one of his greatest shames and she's still here looking at him with those serious eyes. She gives a fuck, she does, he reminds himself. About Steve, not Cap. 

The tea smells fortifying. They each wrap their hands around their mugs and Steve squares his shoulders and waits.

"You look like you're preparing for an interrogation," she says dryly. He thinks that would be easier. This is so _personal._ "Look, I'm not going to tell anyone about any of this. You can relax."

That does relax him a little, actually. He knows she's been trying to look after him a little bit and he's been wavering on whether or not to let her. He's not sure he can take what she says at face value, but now that he's got to trust her, the verbal confirmation is something, at least. He sighs, long and heavy, and some of the tension falls out of his shoulders.

"How long has this been going on?" She flicks her eyes to the laundry machine, as if he needed any clarification as to what _this_ is.

"Since..." the tea gives him something to do besides look at her. He fiddles with the teabag, plunging it up and down and watching the steam swirl upward. "Since I was a kid, really. My body was really sick and...and lagging behind, all the time. It just never stopped. Never got strong enough. Bucky was the only one who knew," he admits, glancing up at her. And then later Peg, but he's too shaken-up and raw to get into that too. "The way most people looked at me for being so scrawny and symptomatic, I knew damn better than to let anyone else find out."

He hears her take a small sip of her tea and stares harder into his own, knowing what she's going to ask next. "The serum...?"

"That was the worst part," he mutters. He tries a sip of his own tea, hot and strong and a little bitter. "The worst fucking part."

"It didn't help?" she asks softly.

"No, it did." He wants to hurt himself, or bring his fist down on the table and break something. An end to it was so _close_. It's so frustrating it could _kill_ him.

She waits, tilting her head slightly. His shoulders are heaving, he realizes. He's breathing a little heavily. He slumps back in his chair and tries to let himself relax again.

"It was so hopeful, for a little while," he mutters, "even when they were using my body as a prop to sell war bonds. It was a weird time in my life. Hopeful, but frustrating. Even after I went AWOL to rescue Buck, that's not when it first started back up again. Although seeing him strapped to that table's come up in some of the nightmares since."

His hands are shaking again, but it feels strangely good, to be telling someone, purging himself of this like poison. He takes another drink of tea. "Didn't start right up again when I first started running solo missions with the Commandos, either. Most of our work started out away from the thick of most of the fighting, just sabotaging remote HYDRA weapons bases, blowing up their transport when they tried to run in materials. But then we started freeing up some of their...live test subjects. And I started seeing Buck in them. The way HYDRA fucked him up, the way some of these poor bastards we tried to save came out." He shakes his head, loosening his shaking hands on his cup so he won't shatter it. He used to break shit all the time when he got his new body, unaccustomed to the capacity of his strength.

"There's nothing to blame yourself for, Steve." Her voice commands her to look at him. He tries to resist it because he knows the steady, burning sincerity there will make him want to cry. He has to look, anyway. "The people that had me, they were among many spy and military programs that tried to recreate the serum. I only heard secondhand what came of that. It's the kind of thing that'll mess you up, though. Just means you're human that it did."

"That's what Buck said," Steve mutters. He can't stop now, can't stop telling her all his weakest, lowest truths about rescuing Buck and failing to at the same damn time. "He wouldn't let me just _help_ him. He wouldn't tell me anything, he couldn't, but he was the one who got me up when he heard me. They'd all heard too many mens' nightmares when the 107th was taken not to know what it sounded like. And my body, with the nightmares, they made it remember exactly how to feel sick again. When I first woke up I'd be sweating and too weak to get up. Ninety pounds of muscle in a two-hundred-pound body. And in the middle of the woods somewhere in Europe. Soaking wet. He knew how fucked up I'd be about it. He'd stay with me, talk to me, try to get me so I wasn't beating myself up. But if I ever tried to turn it around to what was the matter with him, he'd just brush it off."

"Drink your tea, Steve," Nat commands him, and he looks up, startled. "Drink some. Don't let it get cold. And breathe."

He does, abashed. It's still pretty warm, comforting, easing the cold ball of fear and shame that's been sitting in his gut.

"Good," she says. "You have to stop torturing yourself over that. So there was some shit he couldn't face with you. You wouldn't let anyone help you when you first got back, would you? Sometimes there's shit people won't talk about, or can't deal with. And maybe they're making the right call with that, or maybe it would have gone better if they opened up more. I wouldn't imagine a war zone is the most inviting place for it." She taps her nails lightly against her mug. "You're not responsible for how other people deal. Or don't deal."

Steve doesn't know how to accept that. Not about Bucky.

"He was still helping me. Always helping me. It just kills me that I couldn't help him back," he admits, draining his cup and sliding it to the middle of the table.

"He already knew what you were going through before the war. It's different than something new coming up in wartime."

He does know that. It still feels like some failing on his part to reach back, or, if it's truly not his fault, then like some cruel cosmic joke at his expense. "The nightmares and...that...it only got worse. We made our way to the thick of the fighting and that's when I got to see war, real war, real battles. I held it together, I mean, in the daytime. I knew we were doing what we had to do, I had this new body, I wasn't gonna waste the chances it gave me to..." he shakes his head. "I knew why we had to do it. I saw some of the...before we got the lead on Zola, we were involved in liberating some of the camps." Her eyes are still fixed on him. He can feel them, almost knows what look is there. He suddenly wants to throw up for some reason and braces his hands on the table, waiting. She doesn't look away. He lets out a breath. The urge to puke fades, slowly.

"I knew why we had to be out there, doing what we were doing, that's what I mean," he says slowly. "And I wasn't going to complain about the same nightmares everyone else was having. But they only got worse, and I just—going back to feeling sick, pissing the bed. It felt stupid, complaining about it _then_ with everything else I was seeing. But it fucked with me, thinking it was gone and then—and Bucky, he knew." _And then he fell, and I couldn't help him again._

"Damn," is all Natasha says, soft and almost in awe. The silence hangs between them for a while and Steve doesn't know if he feels relieved or just emptied. He doesn't know. Maybe he feels like he wants to throw up again. Bucky would whack him in the head and scold him for being such a glutton for punishment, for beating himself down. But Bucky's not here because Steve couldn't reach back for him, so.

"You know..." Nat says slowly. "If one were well-adjusted, one might say that a lot of people going through it doesn't mean you can't say it messed you up. One might even say that's all the more reason to talk about why it did. But I've actually never complained about my own upbringing, so..." she gives him a small, wry smile reaches across the table. Numb and tired, he lets her rest her hand on his for a long time. It's so nice it's almost shameful. He could sink into the careful deftness of her small hands and all they know. He could imagine she came here just to look after him. He instructs himself to stop thinking like that, to just let a comforting hand be what it is. He's spent so long just getting through, though, and he's unlocked something he might not be able to shut back away. It's dizzying. 

He feels the way he did when he was trying to force himself out of the shower, his head spinning, his lungs emptied. He's so opened up. If he could just. If he could just go back in time. Get Bucky's hand in his, somehow make it come out all right. But of course for all he knows now, he'll never be able to go back and fix what went wrong. All the right questions he asked in wrong moments. He can see them now, his mistakes and shortcomings laid out like a vast and detailed map, and for all he sees and knows now, it won't do Bucky a damn bit of good. Cosmic joke and not a damn thing but. His ma would say that's blasphemous, but what the hell _else_ could this be?

"How do I know," he says quietly. "No one in this century knows this stuff, Natasha. You said you're not going to tell anyone about this, and I believe you. But how do I know..." He makes himself hold her gaze and tries to think about what to say without ruining the moment. She's genuinely reached out to him, and that's not _nothing._ He's seen her file away little details about people she calls friends, though, and subtly put them to use later. That's one of those things he couldn't put his finger on, the complications and nuance that seems to fall into her definition of friendship. Clint's practically her shadow when he's in DC, and he always seems so at ease with it. Steve just can't be, and sure as hell not about this. He finally decides to just put this on the table and trust that she can take it. "The situation's weird. Knowing this gives you a lot of leverage over me, Nat. How can I know that's not going to become a problem down the line?"

Something in her gaze flickers. He feels bad; this genuinely troubles her. He thinks about how she said she never complains about her upbringing and wonders if this isn't the first relationship that's been complicated by the heavy overlap between the professional and the personal for her. She breaks his gaze for the first time, pulls in her hand, drops her eyes briefly to the table. He waits, needing an answer, not wanting to drive the point too hard after all the kindness she's shown him tonight.

Awkward around her injury, she crosses her legs, then uncrosses them. Pauses. Crosses them again. This is intimacy for her, he realizes, letting him _see_ that she’s unsettled.

“Okay, Steve. Okay. You told me one of your secrets, so I’ll give you something. Fair’s fair.” He briefly wonders if that’s how things work to her, methodical in that way, then decides that maybe it makes a little more sense than he’d like to admit. It indulges intimacy with the stipulation of a mutual need for the other person to keep quiet. “I’m sure you’ve heard by now about the place where I was raised.”

“I’ve heard some things.” He has a basic profile on each of his teammates, and it’s not like he hasn’t heard rumors about her around SHIELD. The kind of work he’s seen her perform doesn’t disprove any of it. “What are you specifically asking about?”

She props her chin on her hand, fixes her gaze on the table. “It was called the Red Room Academy. We usually just called it the Red Room. They took in young girls—well, orphans and runaways, usually. It was easy to train us when we were young. Not just what to do, but what to believe. But we had to be conditioned in other ways as well.” She sighs deeply, like she’s thinking about how to say what she’s going to say next. “Obviously, we were not raised to believe that we were destined to get married and raise families, because all that training couldn’t go to waste. They planned to get as much use out of us as they could, as old as we got. But there was only so much conditioning they could do to keep a bunch of girls from being...human. Especially if a mission complication caused them to lose touch with their handlers. They had some problems with some of the earlier Red Room girls. There had been a couple who met boys and tried to run away with them. Just...the kind of wild ideas teenage girls get. Some just tried to run because they realized how controlled their lives would always be.” She makes a compulsive motion like she’s going to rub at her wrist. She does that sometimes, when she’s thinking hard, Steve’s noticed. 

“And then there were the ones of the girls who didn’t run. They came back in a different sort of situation. Honeypot missions gone wrong.” She glances up from the table to meet Steve’s eyes. “You’re familiar with the term, I assume?”

He winces. It seems a particularly crude term when he thinks about exactly what the “honey” is supposed to be. And the pot. He wonders if Natasha ever ran any for the Red Room and immediately decides not to ask her. “I’ve heard it, yeah.”

“I never met those girls, or if I did, I didn’t know it. I only heard the rumors from a couple of older girls myself. By the time I was old enough to remember, they’d already made it a custom to perform a procedure on all their trainees, as teens. There were a series of graduation tests set out as we grew up, and one of them was to have this _procedure.”_ She emphasizes the word, looks up at Steve again as she says it. Her gaze is intense; she pins him in his seat with her eyes for a long moment. He can imagine the nature of the _procedure._

“They made it a rite of passage because they had to make it seem like some kind of honor. Something you would have to be traitorous not to want. Otherwise, the girls might start thinking about how controlled their lives were, their futures. It was never a good idea to allow too much thinking, so there was an unusual level of celebration whenever a class of girls passed a new level in their graduation tests. It worked very well. I allowed them to operate on me without hesitation.”

She’s holding his gaze again, unapologetic, but there’s something in her eyes that’s not usually there. She allows him to see that.

“It’s not as though my lifestyle allows for children. Or my past. I still have enemies, the kind of people who wouldn’t hesitate to hurt a child if it was the best way to get to their target. So it’s not like it matters. But there’s something about having been a girl who let the KGB remove that part of me to make me into a more efficient weapon. It...sticks with me. And I know this sounds stupid, but sometimes I just indulge this fantasy, and for some reason…” her eyes are back on the table. “It’s just a harmless fantasy. And it helps.”

Steve had felt conflicted and heavy, not knowing what he should say in terms of comfort, or if comfort is even what Natasha wants right now. But those last words lift a massive weight on his chest, one he hadn’t realized he was carrying. “Tell me,” he says, and he finds genuine softness in his voice. 

She takes a deep breath."I know...I know you saw that magazine I was reading yesterday. I've never told anyone I read those, and I never wanted anyone to see me looking at them, because I didn't want to have to come up with a lie about why." So there _is_ something around that magazine. He remembers her dropping awkwardly to the floor rather than letting him pick it up for her.

"It felt like a risk even to bring one into my room in medical, but I needed to indulge. And it wasn't anyone snooping through my stuff who found it—just you, accidentally spilling my bag. And I know that you saw, and I know you saw that I wanted to conceal it. And it was probably just a fleeting moment to you, but to me—"

He waits, awed that she's giving him something that's clearly so raw, and he thinks with a sudden pang of the thought he had yesterday, that she might be pregnant. He makes himself keep his gaze on her like she did for him, patient, sincere as he possibly can be. He doesn't glance down at her belly for the absence there. She searches his gaze, her eyes a little wild, but they remain steady, the two of them. She must find whatever she needs in his eyes, because she takes a breath and goes on.

"I like to read parenting magazines. Or, sometimes, books on parenting. Or I’ll pull up an advice segment on Youtube, or I look at the toy racks when I shop, and I just pretend, for a minute or two." She moves in slightly like she wants to hunch in on herself, but she forces herself back up. "Never about any child in particular. Or rather, the children are invented in the moment. I’ll just pretend that I’m out on an errand, and there’s a child back home waiting for me. I’ll see a tip on getting picky eaters to try new foods and I’ll tell myself, “This will be so helpful for...for my daughter.” She eyes Steve a little defensively. “Or I’ll see a doll on the shelf and monologue with myself like I’m debating buying it for her. It’s perfect for her, she’ll love it. But she already has so many toys. I don’t want her getting spoiled. The perfect American family life,” she sighs. “It’s a game of pretend. I know it’s a bit strange.”

Steve almost _laughs_ , all but giddy with relief, but he doesn’t think she’d take that well. “Natasha, that’s not strange at all,” he says fervently, and finds himself wanting to go over to her and take her hands and hold on tight. He doesn’t know how she’d react to that. She’s already every bit as drawn in on herself now as he had been when they were discussing his bedwetting. “It makes perfect sense. It’s just someone you didn’t get the chance to be. Someone who worries about getting her kid to eat vegetables, who’s bought her a whole roomful of toys.”

Suspicion and relief are fighting in her eyes. She takes this whole exchange of vulnerability thing very seriously, he realizes. She _sees_ people, and she’s seen him for how lonely and exhausted he’s been. To reach out to him on the most genuine level, she has given him a piece of herself she considers deeply, deeply private. It’s really a small thing, having a little fantasy like that, but it isn’t small at all to her. In-depth internal fantasies may not have been encouraged in the Red Room, he realizes, although he doesn’t specifically know if that’s true or how to ask.

“It really doesn’t sound strange at all to me,” he says slowly. “Bucky and I…” he stops. He’s never told this to another living soul, and he wonders if Bucky would be pissed about it if he knew Steve's telling Nat now.

She glances up at him sharply, still holding onto that suspicion, and waits.

He’s not sure he wants to tell it in full. It’s one of the deepest-held, tenderest parts of himself, one that he’s had to shield for a damn long time. But he can give her a little, for what she’s given him. Fair’s fair.

“It was easier for me to want it. All my life I was falling behind from what the other kids could do. My body could never keep up, never. So it was easier to want to go back to an age where I didn’t have to carry the shame, of that. Pissing the bed,” he has to briefly drop his gaze, stomach tensing, “Being weak, needing so much extra help. All that stuff’s normal for a little kid. Sometimes Bucky and I used to talk about...missing being kids. And we’d take each other over in stores to look at the toys we’d want, if we really were that age. Got real excited about it, I mean. That was pretty much from right after I moved in with him, right up until he shipped out.” Steve’s eyes are in very real danger of stinging now as he remembers standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Bucky, talking under their breath about what they’d do with an ornate toy train or a soft stuffed bear with a little plaid nose. “I miss him. And I miss that with him,” he adds. If she let him see, he can let her see. Like with Bucky. She showed she’s got his back, and she should know he’s got hers. “So, yeah. I think I kind of get it.”

She draws up her knees in her chair and rests them on the table, rubbing at her wrist again, always her left wrist. “Steve, let me ask you something that may sound odd,” she says softly. “Did you ever want to go further than that? As in, really pretend?”

His eyes snap up. How did she know? Is it just that she’s more observant than most? His face feels hot and he feels more exposed than he knows how to handle, somehow even more so than when she saw the wet spot on his sheets.

“I only ask,” she says quickly, “Because you should know that’s actually not an unheard-of thing to want. I mean, it’s not that common. I’ve just passed by some particular pages online at times. They are very niche-interest, but some people do seem to like to engage in these roleplays. Sometimes there’ll be more than one person, one acting as a parent and one as a child, and it seems to help people deal with...with lost times. But it sounds like you and Bucky were both more like children.”

Steve nods, having a hard time making sense of what she’s saying. It makes sense that he wouldn’t be the _only_ one in the world who craved shit like that, but it still boggles his mind that people would be so _open_ about being so...odd. He sure never could have. 

He doesn’t explain to her about them being brothers. Somehow that’s the line that feels too intimate, too vulnerable. Bucky looked after him, sure, but Steve got to see new sides of him, when they were being brothers, that he often looks back on with regret because he never got the chance to ask about them. Now he never will.

"Let me ask you something else." She's still rubbing mindlessly at her wrist. The top of it's a little pink from how much she's been worrying at the skin. "Remember, nothing said here leaves this room. I don't know what options you had, before, but I'm pretty sure you have a lot now in terms of sleeping. They make incontinence aids for adults."

It takes him a moment to parse out the phrasing just because it's not something he _wants_ to be talking about. Or for anyone _else_ to _think_ about. Captain America in diapers. Talk about a potential image problem.

"It had occurred to me," he mutters, face flaming. "Realized a couple weeks after getting back there'd probably be options now." He doesn't say he'd realized it after a visit to Peg, when a nurse had shooed him briefly out of the room to attend to her hygiene. She'd called it "protection" and it had taken him a moment to realize she'd meant "diapers", but the last thing he wants is to liken himself to an infant or an elderly invalid. In anyone's eyes, but most of all his own. "I didn't want to think about it, and, you know. If someone saw me buying them." 

She nods, thoughtful. "I would get them for you, if you wanted."

He freezes.

This is. It's a kindness, but it's one he almost cannot bear. He gives up on trying to look dignified and pulls one leg up onto his chair, slinging an arm around his knee. He hunches in, trying to hide himself as much as he can.

"You can get them online, too," she adds. He pulls in on himself even more, trying to process the fact that she's really gone from telling him one of her deepest fantasies to offering to buy him _diapers_. "Delivered discreetly. But I can find something for you, if you just didn't want to deal with it, and I'm pretty good at not being recognized. It'd be easier on you than _that."_ He's staring determinedly at his knee, but he's pretty sure she's gesturing at the washing machine. 

Well. He can't say he hasn't got good friends in this century, at least. "I don't know," he mutters. "I don't know if I can accept that from anyone." Maybe he could have from Bucky.

"Get back to me," she says simply. "You wouldn't be the first to deal with something like this after a traumatic event, Steve."

He's sure she's _right._ It sure damn _feels_ like he's the only one, and anyway, it's _humiliating._

"There was no privacy in the Red Room. We all slept in one big nursery when we were small, and then later in our training we were moved to dorms. They kept us rotating, no attachments to one room, one bed. Couldn't get the idea you had claim to anything, you know. It meant I saw a good handful of girls deal with one symptom or another if a particular mission had messed them up. That kind of shit tends to come out at night. There were a few girls who kept a brave face on and had screaming nightmares anyway. A wet bed was not unheard of."

Steve wonders if she had nightmares or if she slept just fine, and which would bear on her worse now. He wonders what her dreams feature. "Was that punished?" he asks dully, not sure he wants the answer.

"No." She squeezes hard on her wrist. "It benefited them to keep us in good shape and keep us loyal. There were plenty of punishments, but they weren't cruel to us for kicks. They actually offered psychiatric aid. All within the Red Room Academy, of course, no outside perspectives coming in. But they were very gentle and caring when they were providing post-op recovery." She tugs on her wrist, pulling it all the way back to her shoulder. "There was a girl a year below me who never really recovered, and became effectively useless to the Red Room because of it. They very gently and caringly had her executed."

Steve is going to get whiplash. "Jesus," is all he can say.

"Yeah," she says, and then, "Well, of course that's my take on it _now."_

She's not looking at him anymore. He wonders what the girl's name was, how old Nat was when she was killed. "It wasn't your fault," is all he can say.

"Yeah, well." She drags her eyes back to his. He thinks she's going to continue on that, but she doesn't say anything for a while.

The chiming of the washer startles them both. Nat breaks out of her dull reverie, eyes flying back up to Steve's. Then she sighs, relaxes, and drains the last of her tea with a deliberate, obnoxious slurp. He's not really sure what to make of it, or any of tonight. It almost feels like a weird fever dream, like any moment he'll wake up small and sweaty in 1940's Brooklyn, piss-soaked again and burning up with a worried Bucky hovering at his bedside.

"I guess you'd better get your stuff in the dryer," Nat says finally "And I'd better go to bed, Nick will probably want to meet at the fucking break of dawn."

He helps her back to the couch so she can lie down. He'll stay on watch just in case; his sheets need drying, anyway. He digs up a blanket for her, longing once again for the old lumpy knitted blanket he and Bucky used to have at their place. He's not alone now, though; well, maybe not. He might have a real ally. Maybe even a friend.

"We're gonna be normal at work, right?" she yawns. "We won't confirm that I came here if they don't already know, and this whole conversation—"

"—never happened," Steve finishes.

"Excellent. Let me know if you want me to stock up on supplies for you." And with that, she plonks her head down and shuts her eyes. Conversation effectively over.

She can't have actually sacked out that fast after everything they discussed, but he guesses she's pretty wrung out on everything she's told him. He feels pretty shaken up, too, but relieved, in a way. Someone found out and the world didn't end. He's not completely on his own anymore. He carefully rinses out their tea mugs and transfers his sheets to the dryer, then takes up a new sheet of drawing paper and begins sketching Bucky's bedroll, empty but for a few loose cigarettes. He still can't bring himself to draw Bucky tonight, but his presence is invoked in the picture; the cigarettes mean he's coming back. He must've just ducked out to take a leak, have a smoke. Steve will come back to this sketch and shade it later; there's so much more he's got in mind that he's suddenly just burning to draw.

*

It’s not until after Nat's fallen asleep for real that he starts to think a little more.

He thinks about how she reached out to take care of him after he told her about him and Bucky. How she offered to buy diapers so he can sleep, how she traded him secrets, made sure he wasn't getting too deep into his head. 

He thinks about that because she talked about those websites, of the people who playact—who _roleplay_ those games, and how much she knew about it. All the specific terminology. In her own words, it’s a very niche interest, but she seems to know a lot more about it than one would get at a passing glance. 

He thinks about her fantasies, how she reads magazines so she can indulge in a game of pretend where she’s a modern, doting mother rather than a spy for SHIELD, and why that kind of fantasy might have _led_ her to take more than a passing glance at such niche websites.

And he thinks about how maybe she over-revealed herself there, or maybe he’s reading too much into it. They’re tired, and it’s late. Maybe there's something she didn’t tell him outright, but she could've _deliberately_ let him see the clues. If that’s the case, then maybe _she_ can’t reach out with it, but is hoping that he _will._

He feels strange and guilty for the bizarre, burning _hope_ that flares in his chest at the thought.

For thinking that sounds just too good to be true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're finally getting there, y'all! Setup is the bane of my existence, but I finally figured out how to set The Thing into motion! As always, updates may be sporadic bc school.


End file.
